Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD), a quasi-New Wave spoof of the kind of detective yarns that Hollywood pumped out in the forties and fifties, is one of the most obscure films by Samuel Fuller, the idiosyncratic American auteur famous for melding pulp stories and flamboyant filmmaking with provocative themes. Made for German television in 1973, it was begun as an episode of the long-running German crime series Tatort, but Fuller expands it to feature length and sidelines the show’s main character to focus on Sandy (Glenn Corbett), an American private eye hired by a congressman being blackmailed by an international extortion ring. Posing as a blackmailer himself, he tracks down their top operative (Christa Lang, later Fuller’s wife) to get to the top man (Anton Diffring), a high-tech villain right out of Germany’s “Dr. Mabuse” movies, all the while searching for the mysterious Charlie Umlaut, the man who killed his partner.
It’s a B-movie lampoon, big and broad and at times seemingly improvised. Fuller sets the tone in the opening credits, where he presents his cast and crew in silly costumes, and he shoots in a loose, shaggy style that appears to be inspired by the New Wave filmmakers in France and Germany. He seems to grab shots on the fly, loading in the landmarks during surveillance sequences and chase scenes and whipping the handheld camera about. The sets, meanwhile, have the anonymous, cramped look of a TV production, and the supporting performances are inconsistent at best. The result is alternately bouncy and plodding and even Fuller fans are split on the film, which plays more like a surreal comic strip than a traditional movie. Some champion it for its idiosyncrasies. I find it a fun but failed experiment and weirdly lifeless in much of the execution—the last thing I expect from as vibrant a filmmaker as Fuller.
It’s part experimental movie, part amateur lark, a minor film by a major filmmaker who is clearly having fun, and has been effectively unavailable in the U.S. in any form for decades until this release and it makes its American debut on Blu-ray and DVD with the recently rediscovered and restored director’s cut, which runs over two hours. Note that the German language sequences are not subtitled or translated, as per the filmmaker’s intentions. The disc also features the 110-minute documentary “Return to Beethoven Street: Sam Fuller in Germany,” which covers a few years of Fuller’s life in addition to the making of the film and offers useful context for the film and a snapshot of Fuller’s career at the time, from director Robert Fischer, plus a booklet with essays by Lisa Dombrowski and Samuel B. Prime (which are also includes as text essays on the disc).
Dolemite (Vinegar Syndrome, Blu-ray) – Who’s the baddest mother (shut yo mouth!) to blow into the early seventies? Forget Shaft and just ask X-rated comic and “godfather of rap” Rudy Ray Moore. He’ll give you the gospel of Dolemite (1975).
Street hustler, pimp, and all around ghetto superhero Dolemite began life as a character in Moore’s nightclub act and was a natural character for his self-financed film debut, a revenge tale set on the corrupt streets of LA. Dolemite is sprung from prison by an impossibly understanding and trusting (yet somewhat smug) warden so he can find the drug dealing, gun smuggling crooks who framed him. With the help of his an all-girl army of kung fu killers and the most flamboyant wardrobe this side of Cher, he lays waste to dozens of bad guys while spouting his funky raps.
Thick, slow, and sleepy, Moore is neither a natural actor not a convincing as a martial arts action hero, but when he raps his funky, expletive-filled stories you can see why he’s so popular (“some people call them four letter words, I call them ghetto expressions,” he explains in the documentary portions of the DVD), and his lazy line deliveries are a lyrical cascade of four-letter words and street rap. But between his raps and his patter he walks around with a blank look on his face and just waits for something to react to – he has no real fire in him, which pretty much douses the energy of the film. He does, however, perform two of his most famous stand-up raps, “Shine and the Great Titanic” and “The Signifying Monkey.” Dolemite is not a particularly competent movie—director D’Urville Martin (also a co-star) is of the quick-and-clumsy school and most of the performances haven’t had much rehearsal—but the weird mix of nightclub rap, kung-fu action, pimp-chic fashion and Moore’s four-letter dialogue turned it into an instant urban hit and has kept it alive as a real cult item.
It’s newly restored for disc from a newly discovered negative and it’s well-mastered—it looks better than ever before—but the film itself is kind of flat and there is a little wear on the elements. And it’s presented in both proper widescreen and full frame “boom mic” versions (the latter, which shows the microphones peek through the frame, was the only version previously available) and features the new documentary “I, Dolemite,” two featurettes, and commentary.
Dolemite returns in The Human Tornado, which Vinegar Syndrome has in the works for a future Blu-ray release.
Bride of Re-animator (Arrow, Blu-ray+DVD) – Brian Yuzna, producer of the cult horror film Re-Animator, stepped into the director’s chair for the 1989 sequel, which is more black comedy than perverse horror. Jeffrey Combs is back as intense young Dr. West, a mad scientist with clenched jaw, pursed lips, and furrowed brow, endlessly puttering with body parts like an anatomical erector set. He’s back to his experiments in the reanimation of dead tissue in a basement laboratory next to a mausoleum, and Bruce Abbot is once again his reluctant partner in patchwork.
This film owes more to the original “Frankenstein” story, right down to scavenging parts from dead bodies to create a creature from scratch (including the heart of Abbot’s dead girlfriend), and West even shows a sense of humor when he treats disembodied limbs as Tinker Toys and brings to life weird little experiments that go scurrying around like organic robots. It’s a wild spectacle of squirting blood, squirming limbs, and an extreme case of tissue rejection, and Yuzna pours on the excess and the gory creations.
David Gale is the decapitated head back from an exclusive circus sideshow tour for his revenge and, thanks to his mind control powers, has bat wings grafted to his head so he can fly around while commanding his reanimated army (“My god, they’re using tools!”). Claude Earl Jones returns as the police detective who wants answers (and perhaps payback) for his wife, who was turned into a mindless, drooling creature in the original Re-Animator, and Mel Stuart is the coroner who brings the dormant head of Dr. Hill back to life and ends up his servant. The terrific score by Richard Band channels the pulsing style of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho soundtrack.
As Yuzna himself acknowledges, it’s an example of throwing everything they thought of into the script—there’s romance, a detective story, office politics, and more—and the film collapses in an entertaining, muddled mess that quotes (among other things) the original Bride of Frankenstein and Freaks, but it’s an awfully entertaining ride.
The three-disc limited edition features newly remastered versions of both the unrated and R-rated versions on Blu-ray (the DVD only features the unrated cut), three commentary tracks (including a brand new track by Yuzna), and new and archival interviews and featurettes.
The Trip (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD), the quintessential sixties “head” film, stars Peter Fonda as a filmmaker who has sold out and burned out as a successful director of TV commercials. Going through a divorce and disillusioned with the trappings of success, he turns to mellow drug guru Bruce Dern to guide him through an LSD trip. “I really think I’ll find something out about myself,” he explains, and soon enough the film weaves in and out of Fonda’s fantasies while charting his freaked out journey through LA to find himself. His world comes alive in intense colors, the familiar and the mundane become alien and exciting (he becomes entranced by the spinning clothes at a Laundromat), he slips into flashbacks (his memory of meeting his wife, played by Susan Strasberg, is a love scene with psychedelic lighting), paranoia, and surreal fantasies, and even imagines his own death.
This was 1967, before Easy Rider, and it was his first time working with Jack Nicholson, who wrote the screenplay, and Dennis Hopper, who co-stars as a counterculture buddy who holds court at the guru’s party. It’s directed by Roger Corman, who earlier cast Fonda in the motorcycle gang drama The Wild Angels, and the legendary exploitation / independent filmmaker reportedly took LSD himself in preparation. While the film was made to exploit interest in the counterculture and the drug culture, Corman takes the subject seriously and brings psychoanalysis to the film as the experience dredges up the character’s subconscious. He also finds a way to recycle sets from his Edgar Allen Poe films. It’s a simple story and the film offers conventional insights, a few visual clichés, and the silliest kind of theatrical surrealism at times (who really has visions of dwarfs in medieval get-up?), but it’s the rare sixties film to acknowledge the possible therapeutic effects of recreational drugs… not that the original audiences necessarily got the message. The producers added a cautionary introduction and changed ending from the Corman’s hopeful message to a cracked image that suggests the damage the drugs have wrought.
Olive managed to secure Corman’s original cut without the AIP-imposed introduction or tampered final image and those two differences have a profound effect on the meaning of the film. And it’s a good-looking disc. Unfortunately, it does not include any of the supplements from the original DVD release.
Donovan’s Brain (Kino, Blu-ray, DVD) – Lew Ayres (now a few years older than the young Dr. Kildare he played in a series of 1930s movies) stars as Dr. Cory, a driven scientist who sidesteps ethical considerations to remove the living brain of a dead millionaire killed in a car wreck, in this 1953 adaptation of the Curt Siodmak novel. The unauthorized, secret experiment, however, has unanticipated consequences.
The millionaire was a tyrannical businessman and his disembodied brain takes over the mind of Cory and uses him to keep hold of his fortune (which his heirs now fight over) and his power. While Cory appears unruffled by the blanks in his memory, his assistant (an alcoholic surgeon played by Gene Evans) and his wife (a wooden Nancy Davis, before she became Mrs. Reagan) are very concerned over his sudden bipolar behavior. Directed by B-movie veteran Felix E. Feist from a script that is more faithful than other adaptations, the film is a cult favorite thanks to its premise and the memorable central prop of a disembodied brain floating in a tank with wires spiraling out of it. But it is written and directed with more function than flair, with lots of talk and some evil millionaire melodrama but not much action or science fiction complications, and it fails to develop the Frankenstein hubris and arrogance of Dr. Cory into any kind of dramatic conflict. He’s awfully mild for a mad scientist and his sins easily forgiven by all.
It debuts on Blu-ray with no supplements.
The saw is family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (Shout! Factory, Blu-ray), Tobe Hooper’s weird 1986 follow-up to his groundbreaking horror classic, which re-imagines his transgressive classic of multi-generational cannibalism as a demonic carnivalesque comedy. Dennis Hopper is the obsessive Texas Ranger who walks into their underground lair with his own chainsaws strapped on like six guns and takes Leatherface on in a blazing chainsaw duel. It flopped upon release but has earned its cult stripes since. The two-disc set features a brand new digital master along with the original HD master supervised by the film’s DP. There are three commentary tracks, including a new track recorded by director of photography Richard Kooris, production designer Cary White, script supervisor Laura Kooris, and property master Michael Sullivan, joining two previously recorded tracks, one with director Tobe Hooper and horror historian David Gregory, the other with actors Bill Moseley and Caroline Williams and special effects creator Tom Savini. Also new featurettes and interviews, along with the previously available deleted scenes, feature documentary, and other supplements.
Cherry Falls (Shout! Factory, Blu-ray), a 2000 self-aware twist on the slasher-movie genre, came after the Scream movies revitalized the genre, but where Kevin Williamson was scary and self-referential in a witty way, Australian filmmaker Geoffrey Wright milks a single clever idea (the killer goes after the virgins instead of the sexually active) without either subverting or spoofing it. However, the scene of an entire high school embracing a “Lose your Cherry” party (to stave off the boogeyman, natch) with exuberant cheers and pent-up repression unleashed is an inspired sight. Brittany Murphy stars as desperate young virgin and Michael Biehn, Gabriel Mann, and Jay Mohr co-star. With new commentary by director Geoffrey Wright and new and vintage interviews.